As William Shatner prepares to be beamed up Wednesday for his first real-life spaceflight, and to become at 90 the oldest person ever to enter the final frontier, he's bringing out the awe in the small handful of people around a rural Texas spaceport.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope successfully arrived in French Guiana Tuesday, after a 16-day journey at sea. The 1,500-mile voyage took Webb from California through the Panama Canal to Port de Pariacabo on the Kourou River in French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.

The world's largest and most complex space science observatory will now be driven to its launch site, Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, where it will begin two months of operational preparations before its launch on an Ariane 5 rocket, scheduled for Dec. 18.

Once operational, Webb will reveal insights about all phases of cosmic history—back to just after the big bang—and will help search for signs of potential habitability among the thousands of exoplanets scientists have discovered in recent years.

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

On Sept. 1, NASA's Perseverance rover unfurled its arm, placed a drill bit at the Martian surface, and drilled about 2 inches, or 6 centimeters, down to extract a rock core. The rover later sealed the rock core in its tube. This historic event marked the first time a spacecraft packed up a rock sample from another planet that could be returned to Earth by future spacecraft.

Mars Sample Return is a multi-mission campaign designed to retrieve the cores Perseverance will collect over the next several years.